Samba Release Planning and Supported Release Lifetime

Future Development Roadmap

As each item, and parts of each item on Samba's future development is completed, the features are landed in the master branch, for inclusion in the next stable release of Samba. Development in master is ongoing, in parallel to our stable releases, and new features always land on master first.

General information

The regular Samba release cycle intends a new release series

six months fully supported,

another six months in the maintenance mode,

six months in the security fixes only mode.

In total, each series is maintained for a period of approximately 18 months.

Example:

If 4.5 is the current release series, then 4.4 would be in maintenance mode and
4.3 would be in the security fixes only mode. The support of 4.2 would be
stopped with the release of 4.5.0.

Each series can have any number of desired minor releases.
These are usually released every 6 weeks (current stable release series),
resp. every 9 weeks (maintenance mode).

Modes

The mode describes the status of the release series.
The following modes exist:

Upcoming Release

Current Stable Release

Maintenance Mode

Security Fixes Only Mode

Discontinued

Upcoming Release

This is the new upcoming release branch. It's not ready for production.
The branch is created when the first Release candidate becomes available for testing, otherwise development happens in our master GIT branch.

Releases are made to a time-fixed schedule, so not all bugs found during testing will cause the release to be held back. Blocker bugs are those few that meet the criteria for stopping a release candidate from becoming a release.

Current Stable Release

This is the current release branch. Available bug fixes will be included in the regular bug fix releases.
Bug fix releases will be shipped every six weeks usually (and on a as needed basis).
New features or parameters will be added to major releases only and not within a release cycle (there might be
rare exceptions).

Maintenance Mode

Maintenance mode means that there are regular bug fix releases to address major issues and security issues.
Less patches are backported to this branch than to the current release series.

Security Fixes Only Mode

Only security issues will be addressed in this release series.

Discontinued (End of Life)

There won't be any other versions of this release series.

Release Branch Checkin Procedure

The release branch is created at the time of the first release candidate.

The release branches are closed to direct checkin as soon as they are created, so for all branches, only bug fixes are allowed into the branch, according to the following procedure:

Every bug that is to be patched in a release branch needs to be associated with a bug report in the Samba Bugzilla.

If the bug is a regression that qualifies as blocker bug to hold back a major release, ensure it marked as a regression and has the correct milestone set.